Retaggr: anybody want my business card?

Written on June 24, 2008 – 9:54 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

I just got a new stack of business cards. Since I’m working in the web industry, they keep flying away from my hands. Web professionals are just eager to get connected, so sometimes they hand over their card while still introducing themselves. Not my really my style, as I like to get an impression of a person, and then see his card. That way I won’t forget the faces by 75 percent of the cards I collect throughout a conference. But hey, that’s just not how it goes in the 2.0 world. So it’s not surprising that services like London-based Retaggr pop up.

Co-founder Ivailo Jordanov mailed me that his service allows people to consolidate their online presence by creating interactive business cards where they can add widgets and links for all their online profiles and data. Whenever a site/ blog owner has made his page Retaggr compatible, a little pop-up shows up with the essential info about the person. Sort of like the Firefox LinkedIN plugin. You can also tag photos, like your Facebook friends do. It looks like this:

Retaggr test blog

This feature totally fits in the whole idea of giving away your card in the wink of an eye, a blog comment is reason enough - so I guess most Web 2.0 people like it.

Jordanov and his team will have to give a lot of business cards themselves these days, as their service lives or dies with the adoption by blogs and sites. He told me that they’ll be announcing some interesting partnerships - like the one they closed with the Italian version of Twitter, BeeMood.com. Only then, Retaggr might become serious competition for services with a similar feature (think Disqus).

I hope you like that post!

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Business card, conference networking, disqus, london, networking, professional networking, retaggr

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

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7 comments/trackbacks to “Retaggr: anybody want my business card?”

Sep 9, 2008: Retaggr has to enable publishers as well as the crowd
[...] up with the essential info about the person. Sort of like the Firefox LinkedIn plugin. I’ve reviewed them earlier and I figured these guys would be interesting for the Five Questions for Start-up [...]
Nov 8, 2008: Retaggr launched Add Me Button, aims to become THE standard
[...] virtual business cards for every commenter was a good step, yet web publishers had to made the site Retaggr-compatible. A [...]

By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jun 24, 2008

Even with a lot of partners it would still be tough to get enough traction. This would work very well on blogs but individual blogs would have to sign up. What keep you (Ernst-Jan) from adding it to TheNextWeb.org?

[Reply]
By Bob Boynton on Jun 24, 2008

http://www.retaggr.com/Card/BobBoynton

retagger gives you four options for ’spreading’ your card. These are my four, but they do not all work equally well everywhere. If this comment will save with them you can see what the comment system will not permit as well as what you can actually add if you like having a card to distribute.

Next: The comment system kept one [the url] and rejected three. If you click on the one kept my card should appear — though it does not popup which would be the best way to do it. The three that were rejected are below.

iframe frameborder=”0″ allowtransparency=”true” width=”360px” height=”300px” src=”http://www.retaggr.com/Embed/BobBoynton”/iframe

script language=’javascript’ src=’http://www.retaggr.com/Script/GetWidget.ashx?t=1&username=BobBoynton’>/script

a href=”http://www.retaggr.com/Card/BobBoynton” rel=”nofollow”>Bob Boynton/a

With any luck I have taken out enough formatting information so that it will see the three as plain text.

[Reply]
By Khurt Williams on Jun 24, 2008

Seems a bit like http://www.idlasso.com/

[Reply]
By Bob Boynton on Jun 25, 2008

They — retagger and idlasso — are very similar in what they do. I like idlasso better as a name. But I found retagger a bit easier to set up.

[Reply]
By Ivailo on Jun 25, 2008

Hi all, Ivailo from retaggr here.

Boris, blogs are a part of our strategy, but we are also working on integrating retaggr into other social enabled sites, with BeeMood being our first implementation and a some more to come soon.

Bob, we also have the email signature option, which is quite popular with our users.

[Reply]

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